I had an escapist hobby that is captured in the history of this blog, making maze [link], and I need escape again. And now I have a 5-year-old User for the output! Cool things: the maze-making code from 7 years ago was pretty easy to get working again [links, links]; the scientific python ecosystem now has notebooks! [link]

But it is also a demonstration of the “fractal” nature of population health—the variation between life expectancy from country to country around the world is big! But it is around as big as the variation between life expectancy from county to county around the United States. And what this work shows is that even in the county where I live, the life expectancy varies between census tracts almost as much as from county to county or country to country. Inequality is happening at all scales.

For the last six months I’ve made brief mentions of the happenings of IHME “Diversity Club” on Healthy Algorithms. What is it?

I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I’m a co-chair of the Department of Global Health Diversity Committee, and we had a strategic retreat in December, where we identified “Training (Stand-alone and in curriculum)” as one of our top three priorities. We had a good brainstorm on ways to advance this priority, and an idea that stuck with me from it was “Different types of workshops, trainings, dialogues (format and topic – individual, structural, policy)”

Diversity Club is a different type of workshop. It has low-overhead. It is regularly recurring. And it has drawn a range of interest, depending on the time of year, the topic, and the competing priorities around IHME.

A personal story about how I started using Python for my research: when I was a post-doc at Microsoft, I was embarrassed to ask them to buy me Matlab. But I knew how to plot things in Matlab and I didn’t have time to learn how to make a graphic look nice with Excel or whatever the preferred Microsoft tool was at the time. Matplotlib to the rescue. It was free, it looked *better* than Matlab, and then it was done.

As readers of this blog may know, I have come to use Python extensive in my research by now. But one thing that I have not changed in the 10 years since that post-doc experience is using matplotlib like it was Matlab. It might be time to change.